Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita nonetheless explains America

[ad_1] When Lolita first appeared 70 years in the past, in 1955, it was so controversial that no American writer was prepared to the touch it. At present, Lolita is hailed as a traditional, a masterpiece, one of many nice novels of the English language.

But Lolita additionally comes with a way that it's nonetheless, maybe, too controversial to the touch. A ebook a few man who kidnaps and repeatedly rapes his 12-year-old stepdaughter, all informed in ravishing rainbow-streaked prose? “They’d by no means allow you to publish that now,” writer after writer has declared. In a improvement that appears virtually too on the nostril, it was just lately reported that Jeffrey Epstein kept a prized first edition of the novel in his dwelling, underneath glass.

“I like that ebook,” somebody informed me just lately when he noticed me rereading it. Then: “Am I nonetheless allowed to like that ebook?”

We definitely learn Lolita very otherwise than we used to. For many years after its publication, readers each nodded to the horror on the middle of the novel but in addition believed it was slightly unsophisticated to dwell solely on the assault. In popular culture, Lolita grew to become synonymous with a teenaged seductress who deserves no matter she will get. At present, nevertheless, the obtained knowledge is that Lolita is just not a romance however a horror story.

Within the 70 years since its publication, Lolita — pretty, sensual Lolita ; obscene, monstrous Lolita ; bleak, tragic Lolita — has change into a barometer of types for cultural change. Vladimir Nabokov’s novel is so multifaceted that it displays the priorities of its readers again at us, displaying us what we worth and worry most at any given second in time. We’re nonetheless arguing over Lolita at this time, and our debates mirror the contours of our present tradition battle: a horror at an abuser’s try to cowl up their abuse; a terror that every one that's pleasurable will likely be moralized into oblivion.

What sort of ebook may plausibly be skilled each as an erotic comedian romp within the Nineteen Fifties and a searing dismantling of rape tradition on its seventieth birthday? Solely ever Lolita .

How did they ever publish Lolita ?

Lolita was born a scandal.

Initially, Nabokov deliberate to publish the novel anonymously, with the one clue to his authorship the presence of a minor nonspeaking character whose title, Vivian Darkbloom, anagrammed to Vladimir Nabokov. However Lolita was so attribute of Nabokov, with its dense wordplay, its butterfly motifs, its musical language, that Nabokov’s pals satisfied him that everybody would know he wrote it anyway.

4 American publishers, seemingly fearing costly obscenity lawsuits, turned down Lolita . Nabokov despatched the manuscript went off to Paris’s Olympia Press, which knew publish obscene novels, and there it grew to become an underground cult object: the ebook too scandalous to be revealed within the US, the literary novel from the pornographic writer.

In 1958, when it lastly got here out within the US, it shot to the highest of the bestseller lists and reworked Nabokov from an obscure Russian-born author of difficult novels right into a rich family title.

To not say that Lolita is just not a tough novel. Lolita is narrated by one Humbert Humbert, a smooth-talking charmer who confesses to us early on that he's sexually obsessive about little ladies between the ages of 8 and 14: “nymphets,” he calls them. His landlady’s 12-year-old daughter Dolores Haze — nicknamed Lolita by Humbert — is only one such nymphet, and Humbert is so obsessed along with her that he decides to marry her mom with a view to have extra entry to Dolores. After Mrs. Haze dies, Humbert seizes the second to kidnap Dolores, taking her off on a demented street journey backwards and forwards throughout America, going from one motel to the following, debauching her all the best way.

Critics have been puzzled by why Nabokov lavished a few of his richest, most enjoyable prose on such an appalling story.

Humbert is such a wierd, unstable determine that the time period “unreliable narrator” was coined partially to explain him. He narrates his depravities in luxuriant, lovely sentences filled with wordplay and neologisms, humorous and mordant. He performs continually for our sympathy: at one second calling himself a monster, the following swearing he loves Lolita with a deep and timeless ardour, the following informing us with an air of triumph that it was she who seduced him . You possibly can inform, studying Lolita , that Humbert needs you to love him. It’s more durable to inform if Nabokov needs you to love Humbert, too.

Early critics by and huge agreed that Lolita was a masterpiece ( with some notable exceptions ). However they have been puzzled by why Nabokov lavished a few of his richest, most enjoyable prose on such an appalling story. How was anybody speculated to learn it?

One of the vital influential early readers who laid the blueprint for a way Lolita can be obtained was legendary literary critic Lionel Trilling.

For Trilling, the pleasure of the novel was the purpose. He was a part of a era of younger, au courant critics who fastidiously prized such pleasure, who took it as a degree of satisfaction that they weren't dreary previous Victorian killjoys who feared each ebook would possibly corrupt the morals of the younger. If it was pleasurable to learn Humbert’s phrases, to fall into his standpoint and study to see the world as he did — effectively then, that was the right option to learn the novel. It didn’t imply that you just condoned youngster intercourse abuse. It meant that you just understood allegory.

Trilling ultimately concluded that Lolita was, in a generic sense, a narrative about love: following within the literary custom of courtly love , it was a few forbidden romance so scandalous that it may by no means finish in marriage, just like the love between Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, married to a different man, and Vronsky. Readers have been now not shocked when novelists broke the taboo of adultery, Trilling reasoned, and so Nabokov needed to be excessive with Lolita .

“The breaking of the taboo in regards to the sexual unavailability of very younger ladies has for us one thing of the drive {that a} spouse’s infidelity had for Shakespeare,” Trilling wrote. “H.H.’s relation with Lolita defies society as scandalously as did Tristan’s relation with Iseult, or Vronsky’s with Anna. It places the lovers, as lovers in literature should be put, past the pale of society.”

Trilling’s argument lived on, in an ever-more-flattened type, for the following 50 years or so.

It was, in reality, the concept that Lolita was about not love however horror, that the pleasure of Humbert Humbert’s prose was to not be trusted, that was the dissenting view.

As Lolita entered into fashionable tradition, it was largely understood by the lens of forbidden romance and adolescent lust. “ Lolita ” and “ nymphet ” each entered the dictionaries to imply a sexually precocious woman. Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 movie adaptation made iconic the image of Dolores Haze licking a lollipop , sending the digital camera a piercing, erotically charged gaze over the rim of her heart-shaped sun shades. The studying would persist unchanged for many years. In 1997, Adrien Lyne’s adaptation performed out the story in entrance of a vaseline-smeared lens, misty and nostalgic and wonderful. Lana Del Rey would play repeatedly with Lolita imagery in her early profession, singing about how romantic it was when she performed Lolita to her older boyfriend’s Humbert Humbert.

It was, in reality, the concept that Lolita was about not love however horror, that the pleasure of Humbert Humbert’s prose was to not be trusted, that was the dissenting view.

<img alt="A blonde teenage girl in 1950s clothes hula hoops while a middle-aged man in a bathrobe watches her from a rocking chair." data-chromatic="ignore" loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-nimg="fill" class="mvmjsc0" style="position:absolute;height:100%;width:100%;left:0;top:0;right:0;bottom:0;color:transparent;background-size:cover;background-position:50% 50%;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-image:url("data:image/svg+xml;charset=utf-8,%3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' %3E%3Cfilter id='b' color-interpolation-filters='sRGB'%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3CfeColorMatrix values='1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 100 -1' result='s'/%3E%3CfeFlood x='0' y='0' width='100%25' height='100%25'/%3E%3CfeComposite operator='out' in='s'/%3E%3CfeComposite in2='SourceGraphic'/%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3C/filter%3E%3Cimage width='100%25' height='100%25' x='0' y='0' preserveAspectRatio='none' style='filter: url(%23b);' href='data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAQAAAC1HAwCAAAAC0lEQVR42mN8+R8AAtcB6oaHtZcAAAAASUVORK5CYII='/%3E%3C/svg%3E")" sizes="(max-width: 639px) 100vw, (max-width: 1023px) 50vw, 700px" srcset="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/GettyImages-607392996.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=8.63599677159%2C0%2C82.72800645682%2C100&w=256 256w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/GettyImages-607392996.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=8.63599677159%2C0%2C82.72800645682%2C100&w=376 376w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/GettyImages-607392996.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=8.63599677159%2C0%2C82.72800645682%2C100&w=384 384w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/GettyImages-607392996.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=8.63599677159%2C0%2C82.72800645682%2C100&w=415 415w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/GettyImages-607392996.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=8.63599677159%2C0%2C82.72800645682%2C100&w=480 480w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/GettyImages-607392996.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=8.63599677159%2C0%2C82.72800645682%2C100&w=540 540w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/GettyImages-607392996.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=8.63599677159%2C0%2C82.72800645682%2C100&w=640 640w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/GettyImages-607392996.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=8.63599677159%2C0%2C82.72800645682%2C100&w=750 750w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/GettyImages-607392996.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=8.63599677159%2C0%2C82.72800645682%2C100&w=828 828w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/GettyImages-607392996.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=8.63599677159%2C0%2C82.72800645682%2C100&w=1080 1080w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/GettyImages-607392996.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=8.63599677159%2C0%2C82.72800645682%2C100&w=1200 1200w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/GettyImages-607392996.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=8.63599677159%2C0%2C82.72800645682%2C100&w=1440 1440w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/GettyImages-607392996.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=8.63599677159%2C0%2C82.72800645682%2C100&w=1920 1920w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/GettyImages-607392996.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=8.63599677159%2C0%2C82.72800645682%2C100&w=2048 2048w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/GettyImages-607392996.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=8.63599677159%2C0%2C82.72800645682%2C100&w=2400 2400w" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/GettyImages-607392996.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=8.63599677159%2C0%2C82.72800645682%2C100&w=2400"/> James Mason and Sue Lyon on the set of Lolita , which was launched in 1962 and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Seven Arts Manufacturing/Sundown Boulevard/Corbis by way of Getty Photos

In 1995, literary scholar Elizabeth Patnoe describes discovering her classmates angrily, belligerently proof against the concept that it may be attainable to despise Humbert Humbert as an unrepentant youngster intercourse offender. The boys within the classroom, she says, discovered Humbert relatable and worthy of compassion, and have been shocked when she mentioned she hated him due to what he did to Dolores. One accused her of getting “cheated the textual content.”

On the time, to take an ethical studying of Lolita was to be embarrassingly Victorian. It was to disclaim oneself the pleasure of Nabokov’s language for no specific purpose.

Twenty years later, nevertheless, Patnoe’s interpretation has picked up steam. It has change into, for a lot of readers, the dominant option to learn Lolita : by understanding it as a ebook in regards to the rape of a kid, and Humbert because the monster who's attempting to idiot you. On this studying, the pleasure is a entice.

Discovering the ache underneath Lolita

There’s loads of proof inside Lolita to counsel that we are supposed to be trying beneath Humbert’s playful sentences for the ache of Dolores Haze.

Whilst Humbert insists that it was Dolores who seduced him, he additionally tells us that Dolores finds her sexual encounters with Humphrey painful, that she cries each evening when she thinks that he's asleep, that she hoards her allowance in order that she will run away from him. (He steals it again from her, however she runs away from him regardless.) Dolores does appear to have a crush on Humbert when she first meets him, nevertheless it vanishes as quickly as she is confronted with the fact of what precisely he means to do to her.

Beneath a studying that focuses on Dolores and her ache, even the novel’s title and Humbert’s repeated invocations of “my Lolita” are an try from Humbert to regulate Dolores as brutally and completely as attainable: He has taken even her title from her, and he has made us, his readers, complicit in it.

There may be additionally some proof that Nabokov endorsed this studying of his ebook. Speaking to the Paris Review for a 1967 issue , Nabokov appeared appalled when his interviewer steered that Humbert Humbert had a “touching” high quality.

“I'd put it otherwise: Humbert Humbert is a useless and merciless wretch who manages to seem ‘touching,’” Nabokov replied . “That epithet, in its true, tear-iridized sense, can solely apply to my poor little woman” — that's to say, Dolores, whose title means sorrow.

In the identical interview, nevertheless, Nabokov vigorously disavowed any ethical or didactic studying of his novels. It’s exhausting to know for certain what he fabricated from Humbert’s followers as they multiplied throughout the a long time.

It wasn’t till the mid-2010s {that a} Dolores-centric studying of Lolita lastly started to realize extra traction.

Within the New Republic in 2015, Ira Wells tracked the public’s eagerness to read Lolita because the story of a sexually interesting younger woman towards the language that steered Dolores’s tragedy. “The publication, reception, and cultural re-fashioning of Lolita over the previous 60 years is the story of how a twelve-year-old rape sufferer named Dolores grew to become a dominant archetype for seductive feminine sexuality in up to date America,” wrote Wells: “It's the story of how a woman grew to become a noun.”

Most likely essentially the most high-profile of those essays got here from the feminist critic Rebecca Solnit, in her 2015 LitHub essay “ Men Explain Lolita to Me .”

“A pleasant liberal man got here alongside and defined to me this ebook was truly an allegory as if I hadn’t considered that but,” Solnit wrote. “It's, and it’s additionally a novel a few huge previous man violating a spindly youngster again and again and over. Then she weeps.”

How Lolita survived Me Too

The brand new Lolita takes have been turning into mainstream simply across the time of the so-called Great Awokening , these days within the late Obama period when it felt pressing and essential to discover how misogynistic ideologies have been encoded into artistic endeavors and fashionable tradition. Gamergate and the Fappening ricocheted across the web.

Then in 2017, Me Too exploded into fashionable consciousness, and Lolita grew to become, abruptly, very pressing certainly. In novels and memoirs of that point, altering the best way you learn Lolita grew to become a metaphor for altering the best way you concentrate on consent.

When Me Too went mainstream, America started to rethink previous love tales and jokes, questioning in the event that they have been actually so humorous and romantic in any case. ( Listen, me too .) Nearly instantly, commenters on the correct started to declare that the left had, similar to these killjoy Victorians, gone too far, change into too moralistic: that they have been destroying artwork and eroticism alike out of a need to maintain the world sanitized and protected and — utilizing a phrase that had change into a pejorative quite all of a sudden — woke .

Lolita grew to become a chief exhibit in that argument. Me Too, these commenters declared, was going to come back for Lolita, and the ebook would by no means have seen the sunshine of day in up to date publishing. “What’s totally different at this time is #MeToo and social media — you'll be able to arrange outrage on the drop of a hat,” “If Lolita was supplied to me at this time, I’d by no means have the ability to get it previous the acquisition staff,” publisher Dan Franklin was quoted saying in The Spectator, “a committee of 30-year-olds, who’d say, ‘If you happen to publish this ebook we are going to all resign.””

You could find Dolores’s voice in its pages fairly simply, when you begin listening for her.

After I look again on meditations on Lolita round this time, nevertheless, what I discover are a few declarations that Lolita is a misogynistic novel; however an ideal deal extra items by readers who went again to Lolita anticipating to search out it appalling, and as a substitute discovered it holds up remarkably effectively.

Lots of the artistic endeavors that have been allegedly “canceled” by the excesses of the woke mob within the wake of Me Too are works whose essence modifications solely while you take a look at them as tales of sexual assault. If you happen to go digging for the voices of the sexual assault sufferer in, say, Sixteen Candles , you discover nothing. Lolita , nevertheless, rewards such a learn. You could find Dolores’s voice in its pages fairly simply, when you begin listening for her.

“Maybe—and at Vegas odds—solely Lolita can survive the brand new cultural revolution,” Caitlin Flanagan wrote in The Atlantic in 2018 . “Nobody will ever decide up that novel and concern a shocked report about its true contents; no feminist tutorial will make her fame by revealing its oppressive nature. Its express topic is as abhorrent at this time because it was upon the ebook’s publication 60-plus years in the past.”

What turns into way more tough, in such a studying, is having fun with the music of Nabokov’s prose with out disgrace.

Who’s studying Lolita proper?

Since 2018, because the Me Too backlash has mounted, the tradition battle over Lolita has shifted as soon as once more. The query is just not, now, over whether or not somebody is attempting to cancel Lolita . As a substitute, it’s the identical because the previous one: How do you deal with the pleasure of the novel, and the way do you deal with the horror? What's the appropriate option to like Lolita ?

In her 2021 essay assortment The Satan’s Treasure , Mary Gaitskill wrote defensively that she thought Lolita was about love, and that she was certain saying so would lead censorious readers to hurl her ebook throughout the room. “I don’t suppose it’s preferrred love, it’s twisted love, however that doesn’t imply it isn’t love. Most likely the vast majority of People who know of that ebook would say: ‘Sure, in actual life Humbert ought to go to jail, however he’s clearly a fictional character and I’m to examine him,’” Gaitskill said to The Guardian . “That appears easy, however for extra mental folks, or people who find themselves loud on Twitter, I feel it’s change into contentious.”

In 2020, author and comic Jamie Loftus launched her Lolita Podcast , an in depth deep dive into the cultural legacy of Lolita . A central a part of Loftus’s argument was that our tradition had gotten Lolita basically mistaken by studying it because the story of the temptress Lolita as a substitute of the sufferer Dolores. “I’m now way more aggravated with how [ Lolita ] was introduced to me than by the work itself,” Loftus mentioned. “For me, a detailed learn of this work reveals that Nabokov is just not glorifying the predator. I consider it’s our tradition that has.”

Now, as a substitute of combating over who’s Victorian and who’s fashionable like they did within the Nineteen Fifties, we appear to be combating over who's alternately righteous and refreshingly perceptive.

Variations of this argument over learn Lolita proceed to play out on social media, the place Redditors vigorously debate whether or not individuals who learn the ebook as a love story are illiterate edgelords caught prior to now, or if individuals who learn the ebook as a horror story are virtue-signaling social justice obsessives.

The tradition wars have a approach of creating every part they contact look the identical. Now, as a substitute of combating over who’s Victorian and who’s fashionable like they did within the Nineteen Fifties, we appear to be combating over who's alternately righteous and refreshingly perceptive, who's shrill and moralizing and who's unafraid of petty boundaries.

The one who may be most useful to us right here is, of all folks, Lionel Trilling.

“For me one of many points of interest of Lolita is its ambiguity of tone … and its ambiguity of intention, its skill to arouse uneasiness, to throw the reader off steadiness, to require him to alter his stance and shift his place and transfer on,” Trilling wrote , in the identical 1958 essay by which he declared that Lolita is about love. “ Lolita offers us no likelihood to settle and sink roots. Maybe it's the curious ethical mobility it urges on us that accounts for its outstanding skill to symbolize sure elements of American life.”

Lolita was written by a Russian, however it's about America, the entire huge lovely seedy map of it, which Humbert and Dolores criss-cross repeatedly over their horrible 12 months collectively. It's Lolita ’s skill to alter form earlier than our eyes, to shift, to mutate, to point out us who we're in each period, that makes it such a purely American novel. The extra we learn Lolita , the extra it has to point out us about who we're.